Recent blog entries by claudio

Contrary to the rumours you may have heard, I'm not dead.
I was only, uhm, resting.

I've just reconstructed the partition table of my hard disk by hand, after gpart's failure on correctly put
all my logical partitions inside an extended. The missing one was, of course, a large partition with my LVM
volume group. So I've learned an important lesson today: don't try to install OS/2 on a disk with (Linux) LVM.
So no Sarien port to OS/2 anytime soon.

Abridged condensed summary of the past few months' events:

Finally ported Sarien to MacOS classic, using MPW and the BasiliskII emulator. MacOS interface programming
is quite interesting, but the memory manager sucks.

Bought a Canon Powershot S110 digital camera. It's a very nice looking, portable and feature-packed 2.1
megapixel camera, with stainless steel body and excellent picture quality at daylight, mediocre performance
with the flash. Perhaps the new S200 with ISO400-equivalent sensibility could address this problem (or perhaps
the fact that my EOS is usually loaded with an ISO800 or so is giving me bad habits).

Considering to buy a small sportbike (the Ninja 250 is my favourite so far).

Considering to learn how to ride a motorcycle (useful prerequisite for the previous item).

Some progress with the guitar.

Should I spend my next vacations in Maldives or Seychelles, or perhaps the Caribbean?

Winning the war against spam, I hope I'm not losing logitimate emails.

Let me state that I have nothing against bash itself. I know it's a
very fine, full featured shell with many interesting improvements
over other shells. Most, if not all, Linux distributions use it as
the system's /bin/sh, which is also fine, but it's the fact that it
leaks bash-isms when invoked as sh that is somewhat
disturbing. First of all, it allows the creation of a multitude of
/bin/sh scripts that are not compatible with the Bourne shell --
replace /bin/sh by ash in your system to see the extension of the
damage. Now take your bash-contaminated /bin/sh scripts and
try to run them in other, erm, Linux-like systems such as
commercial SysV or even BSDs. You can try /bin/ksh, but it
won't work in all cases, and you'll be forced to use bash. That's,
IMHO, very Microsoftian in nature. It's embrace and extend.

What I advocate here is that bash scripts must use #!/bin/bash,
not #!/bin/sh. Let Bourne shell scripts use #!/bin/sh, Korn shell
scripts use #!/bin/ksh, C shell scripts use #!/bin/csh and so on.
Let's stick on standards. It just makes sense!

Busybox patches

I busyboxed install-info, a patch
is available. The dietlibc patch mostly works, except for
strftime() calls. The tr applet must be fixed. (Busybox - dietlibc -
ash... did you connect the pieces?)

Other developments

Trying to learn Python, to work in bm/dm with
niemeyer. Read a bit about
CSS. Fixed bugs
in Sarien. Trying to work around libtool lossage to build an old
rpm package in the current environment.

I installed ash on a test box as /bin/sh and it broke lots of local
scripts running with /bin/sh, previously a link to bash. A statically
linked ash has 100 Kb (built with dietlibc), which is much
smaller than a dynamic bash, and doesn't depend on ncurses.

Also built busybox with dietlibc. Now I'm planning to implement
install-info and update-alternatives as bb applets.